Meta has removed a sentence from its pending commercial terms that said it could use any content from a business account's domains, web pages or URLs to 'provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of' its products. TechCrunch reported on October 17 that the provision, which legal experts told Nieman Lab could let Meta scrape any publisher site linked to a business account for AI training, has been removed.

Meta said the consolidated crawling terms only ever applied to its ads and business products and do not change how it crawls the web. A spokesperson said the company heard the feedback and clarified the terms themselves, and that site owners can still signal choices through robots.txt.

The revised terms still take effect October 30 and still authorise crawling of sites tied to business accounts; what changed is the explicit training wording. Archived captures show the sentence present on October 16 and gone on October 17, in both the commercial terms and the Self-Serve Ad Terms preview.

The fight escalated in the week of October 19. The European Publishers Council, Germany's BDZV and MVFP publisher associations, and then the Movement for an Open Web — a group of advertisers and publishers — complained to the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority, with the Movement asking for interim measures to suspend the terms outright; its co-founder Tim Cowen called them 'clearly anti-competitive.' The CMA met Meta on October 21 and said it was in urgent discussions, and the US News/Media Alliance demanded the terms be withdrawn by October 26.

On October 23 Meta blinked on timing, if not on wording: the terms' effective date moves from October 30 to November 20. A spokesperson said the delay gives Meta time 'to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not'; the company has not said it will change the text. The UK News Media Association called the delay 'a pause, not a solution,' and the Commission welcomed the postponement while it keeps reviewing the terms.